U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commissioner Kimberly Glas, calling e-commerce "a superhighway of the Wild West," asked witnesses at a hearing on Chinese exports and product safety if de minimis is a major contributor to unsafe products.
Seafood processed by North Korean guest workers in China is finding its way into U.S. supply chains, despite U.S. laws that presume all goods made by North Korean nationals are made with forced labor, according to a report by the Outlaw Ocean Project published Feb. 25 in The New Yorker. Relying on government documents, social media, local news reports and local investigators, the journalism non-profit said it found 15 seafood processing plants that used over 1,000 North Korean laborers since 2017, 10 of which shipped seafood to over 70 U.S. importers. Chinese companies identified in the report as using North Korean labor include Dalian Haiqing Food, Dandong Galicia Seafood, Dandong Omeca Food, Dandong Taifeng Foodstuff, Dandong Yuanyi Refined Seafoods, Donggang Haimeng Foodstuff and Donggang Xinxin Foodstuff.
China continues to expand its labor transfer programs for Uyghurs and other minorities, despite a recognition in the U.S. and elsewhere that the programs are a form of forced labor, a new report from the Jamestown Foundation said. "State work plans for this year mandate an intensification of employment requirements for the region’s targeted ethnic groups, and official labor transfer statistics reflect heightened work requirements first introduced in 2021," the report said. "Xinjiang’s focus on these requirements intensifies the region’s forced labor risk, extending it into higher-skilled sectors while concealing its coercive nature."
EU members last week postponed a vote on new rules that could require companies to conduct specific due diligence on their supply chains to address various environmental and social concerns, including forced labor risks.
The Chinese government is going out of its way to evade forced labor laws by making supply chains less transparent, including by limiting access to corporate information online with "heavy" censorship, Yalkun Uluyol, a researcher at the Forced Labour Lab at Sheffield Hallam University, said at a U.K. Parliament hearing Feb. 6.
The latest annual Notorious Markets List, which isn't exhaustive, didn't highlight any American-owned platforms, though the Jan. 30 report from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said intellectual property rights holders are concerned "about the proliferation of counterfeit sales facilitated by the confluence of e-commerce platforms and social media."